A Look at the Tefifon, Germany's Doomed 1950s Music Player

After World War II, people started buying vinyl and record players more than ever before. But over in West Germany, another music player took off: the Tefifon.

Invented in the 1930s by a German engineer named Karl Daniel, the Tefifon is like a mash-up of several obsolete music technologies. Like an 8-track, it plays a cartridge. Unlike the 8-track, a Tefifon cartridge— called, adorably, a “Tefi”— is not magnetic. It actually works more like a record player, since the Tefifon reads these cartridges by pressing a stylus to deep plastic grooves. And like a Minidisc player, the Tefifon is now almost impressively obsolete.